There are two ways to overcome this.

The east way is to find a lab to work in is to go to your major's faculty research page (exactly like this one from U of Wisconsin), scroll through the various names until you find a professor with one or two key words that spark your interest, and then send them a generic email about their research focus being interesting and that you want to work with them.

Dear Professor ---, 

I am an undergraduate studying [---] and I am highly interested in the work you do in your lab, specifically your work on [---].

I am extremely interested in getting involved in research, and would love to work in your lab.

Thanks, [---]

While this is not necessarily a bad way to start your research experience, you are certainly doing a disservice to yourself 2-3 years in the future if you don't put in a decent effort in your preliminary faculty search.

With that being said, here is the thorough, yet much more worthwhile way, to choose a research area and potential advisors.

Do you have to research within your own department?

The short answer is definitely not. While I would recommend you start your faculty member search in your own department, researching in a lab from a different or adjacent field can put you in a unique position to build a deep, strong and interdisciplinary skill set. 

In this case, make sure you do some self reflection during your search. Ask yourself what skills you have or what daily work you might enjoy (and what you might hate). Especially look back on classes you've taken in high school and college or media that you've consumed that really got your gears turning.

 Maybe you are majoring in biology or chemistry, but you really enjoyed learning about electromagnetism in your Physics Lab section. Perhaps you are an adept coder with Python or other languages, but you are interested in biomedical sciences or pursuing a medical degree. You could potentially be a physics major, but want to use your specific strengths in infrastructure development or civil engineering. Maybe you are a psychology major, but more intrigued in its applications in politics or public policy.

In any case like these, you should follow what will satisfy all aspects of your intrigue! Like I said before, the people who span across multiple fields and display a specific, yet broadly reaching critical thinking ability can really stand out during all phases of a career. 

Still, its perfectly normal to look primarily at your specific department. You did choose to study it anyway. 

Additionally, if you already know exactly what your plans are after graduation, don't be afraid to tailor your research area to gain additional career leverage. 

If you plan on going to medical school and just need to "check off the box" on your application, you will want to choose a biomedical/biological adjacent research area, labs that do animal work, and maybe even look at professors with clinical experience or those with a M.D. or M.D./PhD.

If there is a really specific field that you want to work in or do research in after your undergraduate studies, but your current institution just isn't quite doing anything like it, don't shy away from it! Consider finding a lab with a closely-related focus or one that has the facilities/technology for you to potentially carve out your own path.

Why self-reflection is important.

As stated before, a deep level of consideration for your own skills, interests, and desires is necessary before deciding what lab to work in. 

When you reach out to professors (which you can learn how to do here), it is important for you to communicate quickly and effectively why you want to work with them. They are much more likely to ignore you, and they certainly won't make an exception for someone who sends a vague, empty-worded email.

The skill of self-reflection and self-understanding has a vastly underestimated value. While it is perfectly okay to not know exactly what you want to do, it is not okay to not try to figure out what you want to do.

Talk to your advisor! (or anyone)

If, for any reason, you are struggling to reflect on your skills, desires, or situation, or the process of starting seems stressful, talk to someone!

You should have at least one designated advisor, particularly one who is closely connected to the research environment at your school, who is there to talk to in these situations. Your advisor is your primary guide in translating your intrigue into a life direction. They should be able to hear about skills or experiences you have had and tell you exactly what kind of research areas may foster your exact scientific spark! If for some reason your advisor can't help you, don't stop there. Talk to instructors, professors, maybe even upperclassmen already involved in research, or anyone else who you think has the slightest knowledge regarding the research going on at your school.

You will be surprised how many people are painstakingly waiting for bright-eyed and curious undergraduates to ask them questions about opportunities and advice. For many, this is the exact reason they work where they do!

Not to mention, your advisor may have a connection with a professor you may have thought to work with, and they could get you in their lab sooner, or warn you of any qualities not communicated in their online presence. 

Step 1: The Faculty Page

Depending on your situation/interests, you should be able to choose anywhere from 1-4 different departments at your university that you are positive could contain labs doing something that really interests you. Then, navigate to the department/faculty research page. They could be named differently across different schools, but there is always something that looks like this: 

These pages will come in all shapes and sizes, but if your university has a decent research presence, they should have exactly what you are looking for. These images are from the Rutgers University Chemistry Dept. and the UC Santa Barbara Statistics and Appl. Probability faculty research page, respectively.

Using these pages, you should create a list of 15-20 professors whose research area/keywords matched something you think sounds pretty fascinating. Your goal is to narrow down this list to 5-6 names. If there are any faculty members that just really seem to be doing something you couldn't live without seeing for yourself, make a note of this! Keep track of the professors that stick out to you more that the others, but don't discount ones that only have a partial connection to your desired path. The culture of their lab, the size of the lab, the funding they get, the experience of previous undergraduates, and among many other things, their age and professorship can all make or break a research experience with them. 

With this being said, I would also write down, next to their name and research interests, their age and professorship. Professorship just means whether they are an associate, assistant, tenured, and/or distinguished professor at your university. 

This can be significant because the age and professorship indicate multiple things. For one, if they are a recently hired assistant professor under the age of 40, they have arguably the highest research demand of anyone else on campus, as the output of their lab over the next few years will be a determining factor of if they achieve tenure. If they are a distinguished professor, and over the age of 65, they may have some of the highest impact work at your university, yet they might be hard to reach, or you might even end up working in their lab and never interacting with them due to their shifted priorities post-tenure. This idea will be broken down more here, but keep track of this.

Step 2: The Google Scholar Page

There is a fair chance you have never even seen a Google Scholar profile, let alone read a real scientific publication. While you shouldn't expect to be able to open up a professor's latest work and dissect it all the way down to the rationale behind every figure, control group, and the methodology, you can certainly use a Google Scholar page to determine some key factors regarding if they will be a good lab to work in as an undergraduate. 

If you haven't seen a Google Scholar page, here are the three most important parts so you can start gauging more specific details about a professor's work.

The "Tag"

This is the least important, but smallest chunk of information to deal with. Firstly, if the keywords don't match the research area you were expecting, that is a red flag. Make sure the professor is still researching what you want to engage in, and that they are still employed at your university. 

Understanding Citation Metrics

While this shouldn't make or break your decision to work with any given professor, it can give you an idea as to what the pace is like in their lab, and what kind of work you might be end up doing.

The h-index is the primary measure of the "impact" of a person's research. Essentially, this number will tell you if people around the world are using this person's findings as a basis for their own work.

For your reference, an h-index of 2-5 is standard for non-professor academic researchers and successful graduate students, and anything in the range of 8-12 means they have a high enough impact typically worthy for promotion as a professor. Anything over 15 means their work is often looked at as a foundation for future work, and anything 20 or higher means they have, or are currently publishing "ground-breaking" papers. These categories are generalizations, and aren't consistent for everyone's h-index.

Unfortunately, this score can't tell an undergrad very much about if they should work in a professor's lab at face value, but if you like the idea of working in a new, impactful, and quickly growing area of research, this could play into your decision. 

It is important to note, however, that professors with 100,000+ citations and an h-index of 50 or higher are likely going to be hard to reach, and may even require talking to an assistant of theirs. Some people I have been advised by say that these professors aren't worth trying to work with, but I would take this with a grain of salt. A prolific professor with a large laboratory may have bigger fish to fry than responding to emails from undergraduates, but they also have more funding and more graduate students and postdocs who would be willing to work with you. 

The Publication Listing

The first thing you should do when on a research advisor's Google Scholar page is to sort their publications by most recent. If they aren't currently publishing, or haven't in a few years, you might as well cross them off your list. 

How to read a paper while looking for a research advisor.

With their publication listing, sorted by most recent, click on some of their newest papers that have a catchy title to you. Skim through the abstract. Don't expect to read papers this early in your career and understand even 10% of the language and background thrown at you in a scientific publication. No one can look at literature from an unfamiliar field and understand every piece of information going into the paper, not even the most prestigious and prolific labheads. 

Instead, skim through briefly just trying to look at groups of words that make sense to you or spark your interest. 

My recommendation is to go to the materials and methods section of a paper, and look at what exactly the researchers are doing. Are they out in the field? Are they making computer programs? Analyzing data? Culturing cells or breeding animals? Operating complex measuring tools? Are they working with people? Are they conducting surveys? 

The Materials and Methods section of a paper will mostly contain, leading each paragraph, a technique or protocol conducted to obtain some sort of data. If you see any of these that you might not understand, look it up and see what it entails. Is it a chemistry technique that requires manipulating a complex reaction with multiple reagents? Is it a complex physical interaction probing mechanism that utilizes an understanding of theoretical physics? Maybe it involves a particular way of controlling groups of people to extract a particular behavior? 

In all, you won't be able to experience vicariously the process of research in a given lab just by reading a paper, but you can get a feel for what ways you may be challenged or need to think.

Finally, keep the Google Scholar page open for the next step!

Step 3: The Lab Website

At this point, you should have crossed out some professors from your list due to a lack of recent publications, different from expected research focuses, or maybe seeing the inner workings of their papers just didn't spark your interest. With this, its time to move on to the lab website.

Most professors running a research laboratory should have a designated lab website where they showcase recent work, student achievements, accepted grants and fellowships, the lab roster (grads, undergrads, postdocs, lab technicians, etc), and the lab's preferred route of contact. Typically the link to a professor's lab section should be provided up front in their university research profile, "About" section, or the department faculty menu.

 If you can't find a lab website for a particular professor, try a google search. If after a decent search effort it appears that they don't have an official lab website, I would take this as a bit of a red flag.

Additionally, if a lab website has only been updated 2 or 3 years ago, and is not keeping up with the lab's current work and staff, this is also a red flag. 

For the professors that have an up to date, designated lab website, this is a fantastic way for a prospective undergraduate researcher to get a feel for a lab's culture. Some professors may even have a section on their website just for undergraduates like you to see their preferred method of outreach.

The Lab Roster

A good lab website should also have a page full of all the members of the lab, often sorted by seniority (staff/visiting researchers, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, then undergraduates and sometimes high school students). 

Take a look at if there are even undergraduates publicly mentioned on their website. If there are, this means the lab likely has a good environment for undergrads to develop as scientists and may even take pride in training younger students. If there aren't any undergrads shown on this part of the website, its not the end of the world, but certainly reflective of the lab's level of value for training undergraduates. 

If a lab website has a lot of undergrads (4+) and they even go as far to list their particular research interests, then chances are this is a lab that has great opportunities for ambitious and hard-working students like you.

Now, look back at the Google Scholar page for this lab's professor. See if any of the recent publications have the undergraduates on the website listed as authors. Even if there is a paper or two with undergraduates listed at low-authorship, this means that the professor is open to giving undergraduates a lot of tasks, often being open to pushing them to higher levels of productivity and knowledge. For a prospective undergraduate researcher, this is a great sign.

An important disclaimer regarding how to gauge undergraduate involvement...

The level of undergraduate involvement and productivity seen from just a lab's online presence varies GREATLY from university to university. 

For example, if you go to a small research school, with only 5,000 to 7,000 undergraduates, any given lab can be a fantastic place for you to train in. Its just that the availability of funding and the pure amount of students at the school may mute what sort of sentiments they can convey over the internet. 

Especially if you go to a liberal arts college or a school that doesn't provide any graduate programs, there can still be research opportunities that will be a great fit for you, you just might have to speak to professors and advisors directly to ask about working together. 

Why smaller research universities can sometimes be better for undergraduate research...

I want to make a point that a small lab with less than 10 graduate students and maybe only 1-2 undergraduates is not by any means a bad environment for undergraduate research. In fact, it can be a much better opportunity to build comprehensive research experience than in a large lab at a top research school. This is because with less graduate students, the professor is working to match the level of work output at the best labs in the country (where they most likely came from). As a result, there are more things for you to do and entire protocols or projects that the professor may throw at you if you demonstrate a high level of competency early on. 

If you are in a position in which you want to publish a paper, working in a hugely funded lab with dozens of graduate students can potentially make it an uphill battle for you to take on the level of responsibility necessary to publish. I have more on publishing as an undergraduate here and here.

What do you do now?

Now that you have a list of anywhere from 1-10 professors, its up to you to use all of the resources you can to figure out what it will be like to work in their lab, and if it will be a good fit for you and your particular goals. 

You should make it a priority to ask everyone around you who may be a valuable resource what they know about a particular professor or laboratory. Definitely make an appointment with your advisor, and try to make an appointment with other faculty members who are closely related to the research output at your school. There are often more people whose job it is to help undergraduates like you than you would think.

Go through the Google Scholar page, the lab website, and try to learn over a week or so exactly what kinds of devices, procedures, or skills are used most often at a particular lab. You should be able to decide on who to begin emailing after 2 weeks of a decent search effort.

You can find my guide to crafting emails to professors here.